The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  THE WICKED BOY

  THE WICKED BOY

  The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

  Kate Summerscale

  For Miranda and Keith

  CONTENTS

  Family Tree

  Maps

  Floor Plan of No35 Cave Road

  A Note on Money

  Prologue

  PART I: TEN DAYS IN JULY

  1The three of us

  2All I know is that we are rich

  3I will tell you the truth

  PART II: THE CITY OF THE DAMNED

  4The machine and the abyss

  5A kiss goodbye

  6This is the knife

  7Chronicles of disorder

  8Here goes nothing

  PART III: THESE TENDER TIMES

  9Cover her face

  10The boys springing up amongst us

  11It is all over now

  12Box him up

  PART IV: THE MURDERERS’ PARADISE

  13Those that know not what they do

  14To have you home again

  15In the plastic stage

  PART V: WITH TRUMPETS AND SOUND OF CORNET

  16Smooth in the morning light

  17Such a hell of a noise

  Epilogue: Another boy

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  A NOTE ON MONEY

  In 1895, a British pound (£1) comprised 20 shillings (20/-) or 240 pence (240d). £1 could then buy the equivalent of goods that in 2014 cost roughly £100 ($150), and 1/- could buy goods that in 2014 cost about £5 (or $7.50). These comparisons, based on the Retail Price Index, are explained on the website measuringworth.com.

  In Life and Labour of the People: Volume I (1889), the social reformer Charles Booth detailed the expenditure of several East London families. Over five weeks, a couple and their two sons with an annual income of about £70, slightly higher than that of the Coombes household, spent as follows:

  Meat 19/1d

  Potatoes 2/4d

  Vegetables 1/1d

  Fish 2/8d

  Bacon &c 1/2d

  Eggs 1/-

  Cheese 4/10d

  Suet 1/2d

  Butter and dripping 5/10d

  Bread 7/3d

  Flour 1/11d

  Rice, oatmeal &c 8d

  Fruit, jam &c 6d

  Sugar 3/5d

  Milk 5/-

  Tea 5/3d

  Coffee, cocoa &c 2/11d

  Pepper, salt &c 5d

  Beer and tobacco 4/10d

  Fire and light 9/-

  Rent 22/6d

  Washing and cleaning 3/4d

  Clothes &c 22/9d

  Education, medicine &c 1/-

  Insurance &c 2/11d

  Total over five weeks: 133/1d (approximately £6 13/-)

  The average prices of some of these items:

  Meat 7d per lb

  Potatoes 1/2d per lb

  Eggs 1d each

  Cheese 8d per lb

  Milk 4d per quart

  Coffee 1/- per lb

  PROLOGUE

  In June 1930 an eleven-year-old boy walked four miles along a dirt track in New South Wales, south-eastern Australia, to report a crime. He went into a police station in a village in the bush and told the officer on duty that he had been beaten with a brush hook. The boy showed the constable the evidence: his right arm and leg were heavily grazed and bruised; his nose, his left cheek and his right eye were dark with cuts and swellings. The policeman put the child in his car and set out to investigate. The incident was reported in the local press, but to protect the identity of the child neither his name nor that of his attacker was given.

  PART I

  TEN DAYS IN JULY

  1

  THE THREE OF US

  Early in the morning of Monday 8 July 1895, Robert and Nathaniel Coombes dressed themselves, collected the family’s rent book from a room downstairs, and went out to the back yard. It was just after 6 a.m. and already bright and warm.

  Robert was thirteen and Nattie twelve. Their father had gone to sea on Friday, as chief steward on a steamship bound for New York, leaving the brothers and their mother, Emily, at home together. They lived in a small, new, yellow-brick terraced house at 35 Cave Road, Plaistow, a poor but respectable working-class district in West Ham, the biggest borough in the docklands of East London.

  In an attempt to attract the attention of their neighbour in number 37, Robert picked up a handful of stones and threw them at the roof of the washhouse next door.

  At 6.15 a.m. James Robertson heard the stones clattering on the washhouse roof and came out. Mr Robertson saw the two Coombes boys in their yard: Robert, dark-haired, with blue eyes, thick eyebrows and sun-tanned skin, and the paler, smaller Nattie. He knew them as sharp-witted lads. Robert produced a gold sovereign, worth twenty shillings (or £1), and asked Mr Robertson if he could change it for them. Mr Robertson said that he had no silver but offered to change the coin for two half-sovereigns. He fetched the two gold coins from his house. Robert then asked him if he would pay the rent on 35 Cave Road on their behalf as no one would be at home when the landlady called by later that morning. Mr Robertson agreed, and Robert gave him back one of the half-sovereigns along with the family’s rent book. Robert explained that he and Nattie were going to watch the cricket at Lord’s, in north London. Mr Robertson asked if their Ma was going with them.

  ‘No,’ said Robert. ‘We had a telegram late last night from Liverpool and she is going there. We’ve had a rich uncle die in Africa, and Auntie wants to see Ma.’ Emily Coombes sometimes travelled to the north-west of England to visit her well-to-do older sister and her mother.

  Mr Robertson asked whether she had gone already.

  ‘No,’ said Robert. ‘She is going directly. She has had a faint.’ (Or ‘She has had a fit’ – when asked to recall the conversation, Mr Robertson could not be sure.)

  ‘How long ago was that?’ enquired Mr Robertson.

  Robert pulled a gold watch from his pocket and consulted it. ‘About an hour and a half ago,’ he said.

  Mr Robertson asked who was with their Ma. Robert jerked his thumb behind him, in the direction of the house. ‘Mrs. . .’

  ‘Mrs England?’ suggested Mr Robertson. Amelia England was the Coombes family’s neighbour on the other side, and a close friend of Emily Coombes.

  ‘No,’ said Robert. He did not explain further but added: ‘Perhaps Ma will see Mrs Robertson before she goes.’

  The boys set out for Lord’s.

  Robert and Nattie were among more than 12,000 people to travel to St John’s Wood that Monday to watch the Gentlemen v Players match, the fixture of the season at the most famous cricket ground in England. The streets near Lord’s were lined with lawns and villas, and on the day of a big match they were packed with people, the men in top hats, bowlers, flat caps or straw boaters, the few women in dresses with bell skirts and high necks, their hats perched on pinned-up hair and their parasols tilted at the sun. A handful of police constables in domed helmets and flared jackets moved among the crowd.

  The great draw that day was the legendary cricketer W. G. Grace, who, at forty-six, was enjoying an astonishing renaissance. He had just become the first player ever to score a thousand runs in the opening month of a season and was, according to the Illustrated London News, the most popular man in the British Isles. He would be batting for the Gentlemen, a team composed of well-born men who played for pleasure rather than profit. Their opponents, the Players, we
re professional cricketers, most of them of working-class stock. In theory, the match pitted those who were paid to play against those who were not, though many of the Gentlemen were known to benefit handsomely from tours, gifts and testimonials. Grace was foremost among cricket’s ‘shamateurs’.

  Robert and Nattie paid a few pennies apiece to gain admittance to the ground and made for the low, roped-off stands to either side of the pitch. The more affluent spectators took their places in the tiered pavilion reserved for members of the Marylebone Cricket Club.

  It was a clear, hot day, tempered by soft breezes. Just after noon the bell rang and the Gentlemen strode out from the pavilion in their whites to take their places as fielders on the huge swathe of green. The Players’ first batting pair emerged from their shabbier dressing room through a side entrance by the stands, which were partly covered with a white awning and backed by a belt of trees.

  The Players had won the toss and elected to bat. They expected to score well on a pitch hardened by three months of drought, but the wicket proved far more volatile than anticipated, and their batsmen performed disappointingly. By 4.40 p.m. they were all out for 231.

  Twenty minutes later, W. G. Grace and Andrew Stoddart opened the innings for the Gentlemen. Grace lumbered onto the field in his whites, a tiny red and yellow cap on his big, bearded head. It was thirty years almost to the day since he had played in his first Gentlemen v Players match at Lord’s. His partner, Stoddy, was another cricketing hero: a graceful, spirited batsman, with a magnificent moustache, he had led the English side to victory in the last test series in Australia, and had been honoured with a wax statue at Madame Tussaud’s museum in Baker Street.

  Despite some excellent bowling from the Players, Grace and Stoddart were still at the crease two hours later, having notched up 137 runs between them. The stumps were pulled at 7 p.m. The two batsmen would continue their innings the next day.

  The Coombes boys left St John’s Wood at dusk and got back to West Ham after dark. At about 9 p.m., Robert called on Mr Robertson. He went to the front door of number 37 while Nattie waited outside the gate.

  ‘I have come back for the change,’ said Robert. ‘Is the house all right?’

  ‘I expect so,’ Mr Robertson replied. ‘I haven’t seen anything.’ He gave Robert the rent book and three shillings in change – the rent for each house in Cave Road was seven shillings a week, about average for the area but a sum that would secure only a large room in the centre of London.

  Once inside their house, the boys did not go to the bedrooms upstairs. Instead, they bedded down in the back parlour – Robert took the sofa and Nattie the armchair. They fell asleep in their clothes.

  The next morning Robert and Nattie set out for Lord’s again. Their mother’s friend Amelia England, who lived at number 33, saw them in the street and asked where they were going. Robert replied that they were visiting an aunt in St John’s Wood. He added that their mother was out of town but he had just received a letter from her, in which she had enclosed some money. ‘Very likely she will be home tomorrow evening,’ he said.

  The crowd was even bigger at Lord’s on Tuesday and the weather just as fine. For half an hour before play commenced, the fans streamed out of the trains, cabs and omnibuses.

  The Gentlemen resumed their innings at 11.30 a.m. Within fifteen minutes Stoddart was bowled out for 71, but Grace kept going. As he neared his hundred the crowd grew excited and when he made the century a storm of applause was raised by the spectators and the players alike. It was Grace’s seventh century of the season in a first-class game. His achievement that morning was all the greater because the bowling had been exceptional.

  At 1.40 p.m., Grace’s innings ended with a catch at the wicket. Eight of his ten team mates had also been dismissed by the time they broke for lunch at two and, despite Grace’s century, the Gentlemen had only 252 runs for nine wickets.

  The Coombes brothers had brought provisions to the match. They ate their food in the shade of a shed in the grounds.

  When play continued after lunch, the Gentlemen were all out in ten minutes, having scored only seven more runs. The Players came on for a second innings and by the time the stumps were pulled at 7 p.m. they had scored 269 runs and lost just six wickets. They were well ahead.

  Robert and Nattie made their way back again to East London, but instead of going straight home they headed for the new Theatre Royal in Stratford, two miles north-west of Cave Road. The play they watched that evening, Light Ahead, told the story of a man framed for murder by a shipyard employee who had turned forger, bigamist and killer. The theatrical newspaper The Era observed that the show would appeal to ‘the pit and gallery’, a working-class audience such as that found in Stratford, but pronounced it ‘a straggling, uneven piece’ that ‘proceeds on its course for a considerable time with no light ahead whatever as to how it is to turn and in what manner it will end’. The highlights of the production were a specially constructed lifeboat, which was hoisted onto the stage for the finale; a ‘winning and womanly’ heroine; and an audacious villain, whose gleeful malignancy excited the admiration even of the Era’s critic.

  In the back parlour of 35 Cave Road, where Robert and Nattie again slept that night, Robert kept his collection of ‘penny dreadfuls’ – or ‘penny bloods’. These were melodramatic adventures in the same vein as Light Ahead, published weekly as magazines. They were set all over the world: on the high seas, in the crime-ridden streets of London and New York, the jungles of Africa, on the plains of the Wild West and the islands of the Far East. Some took place in a fantastical future of electrical stagecoaches and flying machines, others in a blood-soaked past of noble crusaders and haunted knights.

  Among Robert’s most recent purchases was Jack Wright and the Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea, part of an American series loosely inspired by the novels of Jules Verne. Jack is an orphan inventor – a ‘manly-looking boy’ with a ‘fine, athletic figure’– who travels the globe in ingenious vessels of his own making, fighting rogues and tracking down treasure. In his Red Sea adventure, published in the first week of July, Jack sails across the Atlantic from America to Africa. His submarine, the Meteor, is a slender pod of plate glass and steel, its compact cabins washed with silvery light, flashing with instruments, gleaming with levers, wires and electro-magnets. After much danger and derring-do – storms of rain and sand, the rescue of a drowning maiden, fights with Arab pearl divers and Yankee bank robbers – he reaches his quarry: a cache of treasure at the bottom of the Red Sea, guarded by a twenty-foot-long winged lizard. To vanquish the dragon and lay claim to the loot, Jack dons a submarine suit and dives through a blood-red sea to the creature’s cave. Once he is inside the grotto, a hunk of coral rolls over the entrance. ‘He was entombed alive!’

  The giant lizard springs at Jack and sinks its double row of curved black teeth into the boy’s flesh. Jack wriggles free, aims his pistol and shoots, but the creature only briefly recoils. ‘The beast was floating high over his head near the ceiling, squirming its long, slender body like a snake, and glaring down at him with its enormous, fiery eyes.’ It darts towards him again, ‘its huge red mouth gaping’.

  ‘If it reaches me,’ thinks Jack, ‘I have no doubt that it will tear me to pieces, goaded as it is to the height of its fury.’ When the creature surges forward and curls its body around his, Jack drops his pistol and draws a dagger. ‘Plunging it into the beast’s head, he buried the blade up to the hilt, and a convulsive throe of pain seemed to dart through it, and it sank to the ground.’ The monster lets go of Jack as it falls. Upon seeing the ‘repulsive object’ stretched out dead in front of him, the boy breathes a sigh of relief and rises to his feet. ‘Cruel, savage, spiteful!’ he mutters. ‘I never before encountered a beast so fearless and bloodthirsty.’ The rubies and sapphires on the seabed are now his for the taking. Jack gathers them up, and digs his way out of the cave to freedom.

  On Wednesday, another fiercely hot day, Robert took a key from the top of the
clock on the mantelpiece in the back parlour and went upstairs with his brother. He unlocked the door to his mother’s room, at the front of the house, and both boys went in to raise the window blinds, which had been down since Sunday night.

  The boys’ funds were running low and neither of them had a job. Nattie was playing truant from Cave Road school, a hulking three-storey block for 1,570 students built opposite their house the previous summer. Robert had left the school in May, having completed his eighth and last year of state-funded education. He had then found work in a shipyard by the docks, but after a fortnight had jacked it in. The brothers decided to head for the docks now to look for a man called John Fox, who a few years earlier had been an assistant steward to their father. Fox made his home on the ships lying at anchor: he slept in the galleys and ran errands for the officers and crew. Robert thought that he might help them to raise some money.

  The horse-drawn trams and buses to the nearest dock gate ran south-west along the Barking Road, the thoroughfare at the end of Robert and Nattie’s street. The route was busy with shops: grocers, butchers, fried-fish sellers, tailors, hatters, post offices, a bicycle seller, a marine supplier, a cheesemonger, chemists, coal merchants, confectioners, bakers. The closest church was just past the tobacconist at 500 Barking Road, the Coombes family’s doctor at number 480, the police station at 386. At number 110 was a new public hall and free library, which in February had become the first building in West Ham to be equipped with electricity.

  A mile and a half down the Barking Road, the boys passed the crowded lanes of Canning Town, a darker, more desperate district than their own. The casual labourers from these rickety terraces pressed at the dock gates each morning, hungry for work. Over the previous two decades the docks, factories and railways had drawn a multitude of people to West Ham, swelling the population from 12,000 in 1870 to close to 200,000 by 1895. ‘London over the Border’, as it was known, was the industrial hub of the empire and a new metropolis of the poor. This was both the city and the city’s shadow, its furthest dirty reach.